Could be.
Third parties were USUALLY absorbed by one of the two major parties, as part of their "plank."
Hi, I wrote the article being discussed and I am Italian (and live in Rome).
I think that every nation has a form of government which reflects it's history (take the UK, for instance, with it's parliamentary monarchy).
Italy has a very tortuous and intricate history of invasions, divisions, unification and highly sectorial ideological struggles. It's political system reflects such history in a physiological way and it is profoundly wrong to assume that one system may be better than another: the system that works for the States may not work for Italy and vice-versa.
For example: Italy has tried to shift to a bi-polar system by meddling with it's electoral laws, the result was an imperfect bipolarism where the two governing coalitions are made up of parties with completely different orientations, therefore achieving more stability and less governance.
In my opinion Italy should backtrack to a proportional electoral system which reflects it's background, therefore going back to short-living government which actually get things done rather than long-living ones that just sit there and steal our money.
Alessandro Righi